Irreducible
So there's this guy at Physics Chat Club who is getting on my nerves. He is bright, another retired scientist, but he's one of those big-S Skeptics, in the Dawkins model, and he insists that everything reduces to physics. He thinks Patient and Tolerant and I are somewhere between naieve and dumb for disagreeing.
Thing is, he will never be able to find a physical explanation for consciousness. It does not reduce, no matter what you do! There is no way to reduce Mind. There's no physical explanation, for instance, why a parrot with a brain the size of the top joint of your thumb, and a human toddler with a brain the size of a small melon will categorize objects in much the same way, acquire language the same way, learn to read the same way, and experience much the same range of emotions. It doesn't makephysical sense, but somehow the "software" of consciousness can run on radically different physical platforms--and I think it simply does not, can not, reduce.
To Skeptic-guy, this is not a problem--he simply believes consciousness is irrelevant. The Copenhagen interpretation be damned, he just discounts the whole question of mind. I think that is so wack.
posted by Shelly @ 3:56 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Sure there is. It all came from the same original source. Common ancestry and all that.
It's roughly the same because the basic hardware on which it runs is roughly the same. Find things that are more related to humans, and they're going to think more like humans than things that are less related to humans, unless their brains have evolved convergingly to be more similar to humans' than other things to which they're related.
Considering how much humans have been able to learn about consciousness and how it works even in the last 20 years, sticking the god of the gaps into the spaces in cognitive science, neurolinguistics, and biophysics where we haven't completely explained thought yet is actually pretty dumb. The gaps are getting smaller every day, especially now that we're starting to have the technology to actually look at what the brain is doing while it's doing it.
That's why the vast majority of people who are experts on the subject threw out dualism ages ago. There is no difference between "brain" and "mind"; what we call the latter is the emergent behaviour of the interaction of the brain and the body and its environment. (Psychoactive medications are pretty good evidence for this, right there.)
Me, I like being a meat robot. It gives me a lot more control over myself than I otherwise might have had. I'm feeling twitchy, paranoid, and out of sorts for no reason? Something must be fucking up my brain chemistry. Look around, eliminate probable causes, see if I feel better. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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